The Tour

Every screen,
before you install.

No mockups and no staged marketing renders — these are the actual screens, captured from the app on a phone and a tablet. Scroll through the whole study loop and decide for yourself.

The GemReader library in dark mode, showing book covers, reading progress and a daily streak

Library · every book encrypted on import

On Your Phone

Read it. Mark it.
Actually remember it.

Six screens, one library. Nothing here needs an account, a connection, or a second app.

A passage of The Red-Headed League highlighted in purple in GemReader, with the selection toolbar open: colour, note, copy, search, cite, card and delete
Highlighting

Mark it, note it, cite it

Drag across a passage and it is marked in your last colour; long-press a word for handles you can stretch first. One button marks it again or switches colour and between highlight and underline. Attach a typed note, look it up, or copy it with a citation in APA, MLA, Chicago or BibTeX. The highlight anchors to the text itself, so it stays put when you change the font size.

Six colours, highlight or underline
Typed notes with Markdown
Copy with a citation, page included for PDFs
GemReader Study tab reviewing a flashcard built from a highlight, with Again, Hard, Good and Easy buttons
Study

Your highlights, waiting as flashcards

Everything you marked shows up in the Study tab as a spaced-repetition deck, with a deck per book and your streak and recall for the week. Turn a passage into a cloze card by tapping the words to hide. Cards are scheduled with FSRS, which spaces them by how well you actually remember. Already run Anki? Import the .apkg and drill it here.

Built from what you already highlighted
Cloze cards and FSRS scheduling
Anki .apkg and .txt import
GemReader dictionary popup defining the word effusive, with an Add to deck button
Dictionary

Look a word up without losing the sentence

Tap an unfamiliar word and the definition opens over the page — the paragraph is still there behind it. If the word is worth keeping, Add to deck turns it into a flashcard on the spot.

Offline dictionary, no lookup leaves the phone
Add to deck straight from the definition
Automatic pinyin for CJK texts
An interactive workbook in GemReader with typed answers, checkboxes and a focused text field
Workbooks

Exercises that remember what you typed

Interactive EPUB workbooks render the way the author built them — free-text answers, checkboxes, multiple choice. Everything you enter saves itself as you go. Close the app mid-question and it's still filled in next week.

Answers saved per book, automatically
Survives a crash or a dead battery
No export step, no companion app
GemReader read-aloud sheet with the offline Standard AI voice selected and US and UK voices to pick from
Read Aloud

A chapter that fits a commute

Text-to-speech narrates any book with the current sentence highlighted as it goes, plus speed control, lock-screen controls, and an estimate of how much of the chapter is left. Use the phone's own voices, or download a natural-sounding AI voice, American or British, that runs on the phone. Nothing is uploaded to be read.

Follows along sentence by sentence
Offline AI voices, US and UK
Works in airplane mode
A lecture PDF in GemReader rendered in dark mode with tables and figures intact
PDFs

Lecture PDFs in the same library

Handouts, papers and scanned course readers sit on the same shelf as your EPUBs, highlight the same way, and feed the same review deck. Dark mode turns the page dark, and one switch leaves scans, charts and maps in their own colours.

Same library, same highlights, same deck
Dark mode with a keep-colours switch
Tables and figures keep their layout
On a Tablet

Two documents.
One screen.

On a larger screen the layout opens up rather than stretching — a second document, or your notes, alongside what you're reading.

A GemReader tablet showing an EPUB novel and a PDF open side by side

A book and a PDF, side by side

Put the set text next to the lecture handout and read across both. Two documents, one app, no window juggling.

GemReader on a tablet with the Gems panel open beside the page, listing highlights and notes

Your notes beside the page

The Gems rail lists every highlight and note in the book, filtered by colour and searchable — open beside the text instead of on top of it.

The GemReader library on a tablet in dark mode, showing sixteen book covers, a 28-day reading streak and a locked Private folder

The whole shelf at a glance

Covers, progress, reading streak, and any PIN-locked folders — the wide layout puts a full term's reading on one screen.

Phone · Tablet · Same library, same annotations

Seen enough?
Open your own book in it.

Free for Android, iPhone and iPad. No sign-up, no cloud, no setup — import a textbook or a PDF and start marking it up in seconds.

Android 10+ · iOS 17+ · EPUB & PDF · Free forever